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Former Nova Institution warden says Ashley Smith’s need was ‘to live’

Nova Institution Warden Alfred Legere leaves for a break during the inquest into the death of Ashley Smith at Coroner's Court in Toronto on February 25, 2013. Smith was incarcerated at the Nova Scotia facility prior to being transfered to a Kitchener Facility where she choked herself to death.Photo: Colin O'Connor/for National Post

TORONTO — The image — teenager Ashley Smith strapped into the Prostraint chair, better known as the violent prisoner chair — is bound to become a classic of its kind.

It is one of those, like the photos of Ashley being duct-taped to an airplane seat or being subdued in one of her segregation cells, that speak to her tortuous journey through the federal prison system.

Like the others, the Prostraint image is taken from video made at a federal prison, in this instance on Aug. 23, 2007, at the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, N.S.

Less than two months later, the 19-year-old was transferred for the 17th and final time to the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont., where on Oct. 19 she asphyxiated in her cell.

On the 30-minute video, played Tuesday at the Ontario coroner’s inquest now examining Ashley’s death, she appeared mostly compliant and not resisting but for occasional shrieks, in her high-pitched voice, of “Stop! You’re hurting my arm!” or “You’re hurting my leg!”

She was surrounded by 10 correctional officers, a six-member emergency response team and four COs in biohazard suits.

She was restrained at the wrists and feet, with two straps crossed in an X on her chest. She was wearing a mesh “spit mask” over her face.

A casual observer would be forgiven for concluding that this was cruel and unusual punishment — and it was both those things — inflicted upon a co-operative seeming young woman.

And yet, and yet: Ashley Smith, as Alfred Legere, then the warden at Nova, once put it, was “an extraordinary individual of extraordinary means.”

With all the COs around her, Ashley still managed to slip the restraints off one wrist and began thrashing about in the chair; the ERT team then put her in so-called “hard” restraints, which limited her range of motion even more.

What led Legere to approve the use of the Prostraint chair for the first time in a long corrections career was fear, chiefly for Ashley, but also for his staff.

Nova had just been through a hostage-taking six days earlier; another inmate on the prison’s small segregation ward had grabbed a CO, held a homemade shiv to her throat, and though the incident ended peacefully, the staff, already exhausted, was traumatized.

No fewer than 13 were now off on workers’ compensation as a result of the hostage-taking; the rest had lost faith in the prison’s heretofore therapeutic approach to corrections. “We were incapacitated,” Legere said.

Earlier that day, Ashley had begun banging her head first against the cell door, then against the floor. Staff could see blood in the cell, and on her forehead, but she ignored their commands to stop.

“I thought she was going to kill herself by banging her head on the floor,” Legere said.

By this point, Ashley had been back at Nova for about a month. After a couple of stable weeks, a guard noticed the window in her cell was shattered, and reported it, but it was inexplicably left that way for at least a week, and Ashley, of course, had hidden pieces of the glass in her body cavities.

Despite that, her relatively good behaviour earned her the chance to wear street clothes, but within days, she was making ligatures from the T-shirt and tying up with a frenzy.

At one point that month, she had tied 34 ligatures within a few days, and with each one, the COs went into her cell to cut it off and save her life.

(Legere said staff estimated she made 27 ligatures from that one T-shirt.)

The Prostraint chair was a last resort, Legere said. New to the prison, and in fact brought in in anticipation of Ashley’s return to Nova, he disliked even the idea of it.

During training, Legere even sat in the chair, strapped in, for about 20 minutes, “to judge the humanity of it.”

When Ashley wouldn’t stop banging her head on the floor, COs went into her cell, and held her down for about 90 minutes, until the ERT team was organized and came to put her in the chair.

She remained in it for eight hours, until about midnight.

Unlike the warden and others at Grand Valley, where the jurors have heard the orders were not to go into Ashley’s cell if she was still breathing, Legere wanted his COs to get in there as soon as they saw a ligature on Ashley’s neck. He spread that message “far and wide and frequently”, he said.

As Breese Davies, who represents the Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, put it to him, “If Ashley was in any form of distress,” the guards were to go into her cell?

“Yes,” Legere said, even “if that meant holding her on the floor for four to five hours” or using the dreadful Prostraint chair.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile